The search engine reveals a series of interesting figures in its annual spam report and explains how it is combating this practice, which distorts its search results.
Google has just published its Webspam Report 2019, in which it reveals a series of key figures on spam on its search engine.
On its blog, Google defines spam as
“the use of techniques which try to imitate these signals (the factors allowing Google to determine the quality of content) without really keeping the promise of content from high quality or other tactics that could be harmful to internet users.”
Among the hundreds of billions of web pages referenced in its index, the search engine indicates that it has identified more than 25 billion spam pages every day. This is an impressive figure, which demonstrates the magnitude of the task to combat this practice, in order to offer high-quality content to Internet users. Google estimates that 99% of visits have led to spam-free experiences for its users, thanks to the actions implemented by the American engine.
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Over 90% of link spam made less effective
In 2018, Google had reduced by 80% of the spam generated by Internet users through publications published on forums, blogs, or other platforms. This figure did not change in 2019. In its report, the firm also specifies that link spam remains a popular practice, like paid links or link exchanges. With the efforts made by Google teams to combat this technique, more than 90% of link spam has been made less effective, the document said.
While spam sites with automatically generated or scraped content have increased in recent years, Google says it has reduced the impact of this type of content on users by 60% compared to 2018.
Among the other data to retain from this report, it can also be noted that:
- Of nearly 230,000 search spam reports received in 2019, 82% of them were processed by Google.
- Over 90 million messages have been sent to site owners to inform them of issues that may affect the appearance of their site in SERPs, as well as possible improvements to be implemented.
- About 4.3 million messages were about manual actions resulting from webmaster breaches of Google’s guidelines.
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Google’s actions to combat spam
The Webspam Report 2019 is also an opportunity for the American company to specify how it is trying to fight spam in its search results.
One of our top priorities in 2019 was to improve our spam fighting capabilities through machine learning systems. Our machine learning solutions, combined with our manual actions that have proven their worth in the past, have played a decisive role in identifying and preventing the results associated with spam and provided to users, explains Google in its report.
If Google automatically identifies spam practices in the majority of cases, the American firm also relies on a team of analysts to determine if the content or a site risks distorting the ranking of its SERPs. This process thus leads Google to improve the functioning of its automated systems for better spam detection. Once spotted, content is demoted or deleted from search results. Manual actions can be performed from the Search Console to resolve the problem.
